NEWGATE WITHIN.
The entrance to Newgate is through the keeper's lodge, which, with the
house in which the keeper lives, occupies the centre of what has been
well called "this vast quarry of stone." It fronts on the Old Bailey.
The prisoner's quarters are in the wings, which extend from either side
of the keeper's quarters. In the gloomy office, men with that
indescribable prison air all such officials bear, lounge about, and come
and go on business. There is iron everywhere, from the huge bolts on the
outer doors, and the door inside of them, to the barred windows and
other doors beyond number, that open and shut with a sullen clangor that
goes echoing through the stone passages as if it would never die away.
The smell of the jail is as powerful in its way as these evidences of
its actual strength. It blows into your face in a strong breath when the
door opens for you, and you find it lingering about you hours after your
visit has been made. Some scientist ought to analyze this odor of the
prison. It is unique. A soldier's barracks, a hospital, a ship's
forecastle--all places, in short, where men live in close quarters--have
an odor that tells of their origin; but the scent of the jail is
different from all, and as horrible as the thing it recalls to you
whenever you breathe it, or fancy you do.
"What London pedestrian is there," writes Dickens, in chapter 24 in the
"Sketches by Boz," "who has not, at some time or other, cast a hurried
glance through the wicket at which the prisoners are admitted into this
gloomy mansion, and surveyed the few objects he could discern, with an
indescribable feeling of curiosity. The thick door, plated with iron,
and mounted with spikes just low enough to enable you to see leaning
over them an ill-looking fellow, in a broad-brimmed hat, Belcher
handkerchief and top-boots; with a brown coat, something between a
great-coat and a 'sporting' jacket, on his back, and an immense key in
his left hand. Perhaps you are lucky enough to pass just as the gate is
being opened; then, you see on the other side of the lodge another gate,
the image of its predecessor, and two or three more turnkeys, who look
like multiplications of the first one, seated around a fire, which just
lights up the white-washed apartment sufficiently to enable you to catch
a glimpse of these different objects." In the next paper of the same
series, he conducts us within the lodge. "One side is plentifully
garnished with a choice collection of heavy sets of irons, including
those worn by the redoubtable Jack Sheppard--genuine; and those said to
have been graced by the sturdy limbs of the no less celebrated Dick
Turpin--doubtful. From this lodge a heavy oaken gate, bound with iron,
studded with nails of the same material, and guarded by another turnkey,
opens on a few steps, if we remember right, which terminate in a narrow
and dismal stone passage, running parallel with the Old Bailey and
leading to the different yards, through a number of tortuous and
intricate windings, guarded in their turn by huge gates and gratings,
whose appearance is sufficient to dispel at once the slightest hope of
escape that any newcomer may have entertained; and the very recollection
of which, on eventually traversing the place again, involves one in a
maze of confusion."
The old Newgate which the Gordon rioters sacked was a horrible place.
The cells were mere black caves, which riddled the tremendous masonry
like a stone honeycomb. In these at one time, while a contagious fever
was raging, 800 prisoners were confined. The captives were packed in
these dens like slaves in the hold of their prison-ship. Mrs. Frye
describes the women as "swearing, gaming, fighting, singing, dancing,
drinking, and dressing up in men's clothes," and as late as 1838
gambling with cards, dice and draughts was common among the male
prisoners. Jail distempers now and then purged this sink of vileness of
a portion of its inmates, till at last, in 1858, the reconstruction of
its cellular system was completed. Even with that, however, Newgate is
anything but a perfect jail. In the earlier Dickens era it preserved
many of its ancient characteristics. In "Great Expectations," when
Wemmick takes Pip to visit it, we read: "At that time gaols were much
neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all
public wrong-doing--and which is always its longest and heaviest
punishment--was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better
than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their
prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.
It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in; and a potman was going his
rounds with beer; and the prisoners behind the bars in the yards were
buying beer, and talking to friends; and a frowsy, ugly, disorderly,
depressing scene it was." The earlier description, "A Visit to Newgate,"
in the Boz "Sketches," thus depicts the women's side of the jail:
"The buildings in the prison--or in other words the different
wards--form a square, of which the four sides abut respectively on the
Old Bailey, the old College of Physicians (now forming a part of
Newgate Market), the Sessions House and Newgate street. The
intermediate space is divided into several paved yards, in which the
prisoners take such air and exercise as can be had in such a place.
These yards, with the exception of that in which the prisoners under
the sentence of death are confined, run parallel with Newgate street,
and consequently from the Old Bailey, as it were, to Newgate Market.
Turning to the right, we came to a door composed of thick bars of
wood, through which were discernible, passing to and fro in a narrow
yard, some twenty women. One side of this yard is railed at a
considerable distance, and formed into a kind of iron cage, about five
feet and ten inches in height, roofed at the top, and defended in the
front by iron bars, from which the friends of the female prisoners
communicate with them. Two or three women were standing at different
parts of the grating conversing with their friends, but a very large
portion of the prisoners appeared to have no friends at all, beyond
such of their old companions as might happen to be within the walls.
We were conducted up a clean and well lighted flight of stone steps to
one of the wards. A description of one is a description of the whole.
"It was in a spacious, bare, whitewashed apartment, lighted, of
course, by windows looking into the interior of the prison, but far
more light and airy than one could reasonably expect to find in such a
situation. There was a large fire, with a deal table before it, round
which ten or a dozen women were seated on wooden forms at dinner.
Along both sides of the room ran a shelf; below it, at regular
intervals, a row of large hooks were fixed in the wall, on each of
which was hung the sleeping mat of a prisoner; her rug and blanket
being folded up, and placed on the shelf above. At night these mats
are placed upon the floor, each beneath the hook on which it hangs
during the day; and the ward is made to thus answer the purposes both
of a day room and a sleeping apartment. Over the fireplace was a large
sheet of pasteboard, on which were displayed a variety of texts from
Scripture, which were also scattered about the room in scraps about
the size and shape of the copy slips which are used in schools. On the
table was a sufficient provision of a kind of stewed beef and brown
bread, in pewter dishes which are kept perfectly bright, and displayed
on shelves in great order and regularity when not in use.
"In every ward of the female side a wards-woman is appointed to
preserve order, and a similar regulation is adopted among the males.
The wards-men and wards-women are all prisoners, selected for good
conduct. They alone are allowed the privilege of sleeping on
bedsteads: a small stump bedstead being placed in every ward for the
purpose."
This, in itself, was a vast improvement on the style of the last century
in Newgate. Then the prisoner had no comfort unless he paid roundly for
it. His cell contained a stone bench or two, on which the first comer
might make his bed. The rest slept on the floor. Once in a great while a
truss of straw was tossed in to them, as it might have been to a beast
in a stall. This straw remained until it rotted to a pulp. Then another
truss was used to scatter over it. So, in time, the prisoners slept on a
veritable dunghill, the compost being generally left to fester till it
bred a fever, when it would be carted off, to disseminate the germs of
disease which it had engendered, outside the jail walls; and the same
process was begun over again. In the matter of cleanliness a change for
the better had been made in Dickens's time; but one great evil of the
jail was the herding together of the prisoners in the wards. Here the
possibly innocent learned evil lessons from the guilty; the depraved
could deprave those not yet wholly debased; the gaol became, in short,
not so much a place of punishment for crime as a powerful breeder of it,
and many a man and boy, and woman and girl, who went into Newgate for a
trivial offense, emerged from it a full-fledged and incorrigible
lawbreaker. So outrageous did this condition of things become that many
thoughtful men began seriously to question whether the means of
restricting crime, as practiced in Newgate, were not really worse than
the crime itself. In the sketch already quoted, Dickens says:
"They (the men's wards) are provided, like the wards of the women's
side, with mats and rugs, which are disposed of in the same manner
during the day; the only very striking difference between their
appearance and that of the wards inhabited by the women is the utter
absence of employment. Huddled on two opposite forms by the fireside
sit twenty men, perhaps; here a boy in livery; there a man in a rough
great-coat and top-boots; further on, a desperate-looking fellow in
his shirtsleeves, with an old Scotch cap upon his shaggy head; near
him again, a tall ruffian in a smock-frock; next to him a miserable
being of distressed appearance, with his head resting on his hand--all
alike in one respect, all idle and listless; when they do leave the
fire, sauntering moodily about, lounging in the windows, or leaning
against the wall, vacantly swinging their bodies to and fro. With the
exception of an old man reading a newspaper, in two or three instances
this was the case in every ward we entered. The only communication
these men have with their friends is through two close iron gratings,
with an intermediate space of about a yard in width between the two,
so that nothing can be handed across, nor can the prisoner have any
communication by touch with the person who visits him. The married men
have a separate grating at which to see their wives, but its
construction is the same."
When the prisoners had visitors a keeper always sat in the space between
the gratings, so that private communication was practically impossible.
The only exception was made in favor of lawyers in visiting their
clients; but prisoners of note could secure the privilege of privacy
through the pressure of official influence on the head keeper. In fact,
during later years an effort, only partially successful, was made in
Newgate to grade the prisoners according to their criminal standard, and
to keep the classes apart. So, persistent and desperate offenders were
assigned to one ward and those less confirmed in crime to another, while
boys and youths were separated from the older prisoners, whose influence
on them could not be but for evil. Under the more humane management of
the present century Newgate was even provided with a school. "A portion
of the prison," says Boz, in his "Visit," "is set apart for boys under
fourteen years of age." "In a tolerable sized room, in which were
writing materials and some copybooks, was the school-master with a
couple of his pupils; the remainder having been fetched from an
adjoining apartment, the whole were drawn up in a line for our
inspection. There were fourteen of them in all, some with shoes, some
without; some in pinafores without jackets, others in jackets without
pinafores, and one in scarce anything at all. The whole number, without
an exception, we believe, had been committed for trial on charges of
pocket-picking; and fourteen such terrible little faces we never beheld.
There was not a glance of honesty, not a wink expressive of anything but
the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection. As to anything like
shame or contrition, that was entirely out of the question. They were
evidently quite gratified at being thought worth the trouble of looking
at; their idea appeared to be that we had come to see Newgate as a grand
affair, and that they were an indispensable part of the show; and every
boy as he 'fell in' to the line actually seemed as pleased and important
as if he had done something excessively meritorious in getting there at
all."
Dickens had made a close study of this type of London gamin, as we have
discovered in his Artful Dodger, Master Bates, and other demoralizing
and diverting characterizations. In the Boz sketch called "Criminal
Courts" he describes the trial of such an imp at the Old Bailey court:
"A boy of thirteen is tried, say, for picking the pocket of some
subject of Her Majesty, and the offense is about as clearly proved as
an offense can be. He is called upon for his defence, and contents
himself with a little declamation about the jurymen and his country;
asserts that all the witnesses have committed perjury, and hints that
the police force generally have entered into a conspiracy against him.
However probable his statement may be, it fails to convince the Court,
and some such scene as the following takes place:
"Court: Have you any witnesses to speak for your character, boy?
"Boy: Yes, my Lord; fifteen gen'lm'n is a vaten outside, and vos
avaten all day yesterday, vich they told me the night afore my trial
vos a coming on.
"Court: Inquire for these witnesses.
"Here a stout beadle runs out, and vociferates for the witness at the
very top of his voice; for you hear his cry grow fainter and fainter
as he descends the steps into the courtyard below. After an absence of
five minutes he returns, very warm and hoarse, and informs the Court
of what he knew perfectly well before--namely, that there are no such
witnesses in attendance. Hereupon the boy sets up a most awful
howling, screws the lower part of the palms of his hands into the
corners of his eyes, and endeavors to look the picture of injured
innocence. The jury at once find him 'guilty,' and his endeavors to
squeeze out a tear are redoubled. The governor of the gaol then
states, in reply to an inquiry from the bench, that the prisoner has
been under his care twice before. This the urchin resolutely denies in
some such terms as: 'S'elp me, gen'lm'n, I never vos in trouble
afore--indeed, my Lord, I never vos. It's all a howen to my having a
twin brother, vich has wrongfully got into trouble, and vich is so
exactly like me, that no one ever knows the difference atween us.'
"This representation, like the defence, fails in producing the desired
effect, and the boy is sentenced, perhaps, to seven years'
transportation. Finding it impossible to excite compassion, he gives
vent to his feelings in an imprecation bearing reference to the eyes
of 'old big vig,' and as he declines to take the trouble of walking
from the dock, is forthwith carried out, congratulating himself on
having succeeded in giving everybody as much trouble as possible."
In a similar vein, when the Artful Dodger falls into the toils ("Oliver
Twist," Chapter 43) he asserts himself.
"It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the
big coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and
his hat in his right hand, preceded the gaoler, with a rolling gait
altogether indescribable, and taking his place in the dock, requested
in an audible voice to know what he was placed in 'that 'ere
disgraceful situation for.'
"'Hold your tongue, will you?' said the gaoler.
"'I'm an Englishman, ain't I?' rejoined the Dodger. 'Where are my
privileges?'
"'You'll get your privileges soon enough,' retorted the gaoler, 'and
pepper with 'em.'
"'We'll see what the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got
to say to the beaks, if I don't,' replied Mr. Dawkins.
"'Now then. Wot is this here business? I shall thank the madg'strates
to dispose of this little affair, and not to keep me while they read
the paper, for I've got an appointment with a gentleman in the city,
and as I'm a man of my word and very punctual in business matters,
he'll go away if I ain't there to my time, and then p'raps there won't
be an action for damages against them as kept me away. Oh, no,
certainly not.'
"At this point the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a
view to the proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the gaoler to
communicate 'the names of them two files as was on the bench,' which
so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as
Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request.
"'Silence there,' cried the gaoler.
"'What is this?' inquired one of the magistrates.
"'A pocket-picketing case, your worship.'
"'Has the boy ever been here before?'
"'He ought to have been, a many times,' replied the gaoler. 'He has
been pretty well everywhere else. I know him well, your worship.'
"'Oh, you know me, do you?' cried the Artful, making a note of the
statement. 'Werry good. That's a case of deformation of character, any
way.'
"Here there was another laugh, and another cry for silence.
"'Now then, where are the witnesses?' said the clerk.
"'Ah, that's right,' added the Dodger. 'Where are they? I should like
to see 'em.'
"This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward
who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman
in the crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a
very old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his
own countenance. For this reason he took the Dodger into custody as
soon as he could get near him, and the said Dodger being searched, had
upon his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner's name engraved
upon the lid. This gentleman had been discovered upon reference to the
Court Guide, and being then and there present, swore that the
snuff-box was his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the
moment he had disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to. He
had also remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active
in making his way about, and that the young gentleman was the prisoner
before him.
"'Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?' said the magistrate.
"'I wouldn't abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with
him,' replied the Dodger.
"'Have you anything to say at all?'
"'Do you hear his worship ask if you've anything to say?' inquired the
gaoler, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow.
"'I beg your pardon,' said the Dodger, looking up with an air of
abstraction.
"'Did you mean to say anything, you young shaver?'
"'No,' replied the Dodger, 'not here, for this ain't the shop for
justice; besides which, my attorney is a breakfasting this morning
with the Wice-President of the House of Commons; but I shall have
something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery
numerous and 'spectable circle of acquaintances as'll make them beaks
wish they'd never been born, or that they'd got their footman to hang
'em up to their own hat-pegs afore they let 'em come out this morning
to try it upon me. I'll----'
"'There. He's fully committed,' interposed the clerk. 'Take him away.'
"'Oh, ah. I'll come on,' replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the
palm of his hand. 'Ah (to the bench) it's no use your looking
frightened; I won't show you no mercy, not a ha'porth of it. You'll
pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn't be you for something; I
wouldn't go free now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask
me. Here, carry me off to prison. Take me away.'
"With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by
the collar, threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a
parliamentary business of it, and then grinning in the officer's face
with glee and self approval."
To such scholars as these, all the schools that could be crowded into
Newgate would be of no avail. Their biographies are summed up by
Magwitch, in "Great Expectations," who, blandly admitting to have been
brought up to be "a warmint," says:
"'In gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of
gaol. That's my life. I've been done everything to, pretty
well--except hanged. I've been locked up as much as a silver
tea-kettle. I've been carted here and carted there, and put out of
this town and put out of that town. I've no more notion where I was
born than you have, if so much. I first became aware of myself down in
Essex, a-thieving turnips for a living. Summun had run away from me--a
man, a tinker--and he'd took the fire with him and left me very cold.
"'I knowed my name to be Magwitch, christened Abel. How did I know it?
Much as I knowed the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
sparrer, thrush. I might have thought that it was all lies together,
only, as the birds' names come out true, I suppose mine did.
"'So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel
Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but what caught fright at
him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up,
took up, to that extent that I reg'larly growed up took up.'"
One of the most curious episodes of Newgate is connected with the
hanging of the Rev. W. Dodd, for forgery, on Friday, June 6, 1777. The
clerical malefactor preached his own funeral sermon in the chapel of the
prison before he was led out to die, the text being from Acts XV, 23.
The theatre of this remarkable valedictory went up in the smoke of the
Gordon Riots, but there is a chapel in the reconstructed jail:
"situated," says Boz, "at the back of the governor's house; the latter
having no windows looking into the interior of the prison. Whether the
associations connected with the place--the knowledge that here a portion
of the burial is, on some dreadful occasions, performed over the quick
and not over the dead--cast over it a still more gloomy and sombre air
than art has imparted to it, we know not, but its appearance is very
striking. The meanness of its appointments--the bare scanty pulpit, with
the paltry painted pillars on either side--the women's gallery with its
great heavy curtains--the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy
front--the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on
the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and
damp--so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and the wood of a
modern church--are strange and striking. There is one object, too, which
rivets the attention and fascinates the gaze, and from which we may turn
horror-stricken in vain, for the recollection of it will haunt us waking
and sleeping for a long time afterward. Immediately below the reading
desk, on the floor of the chapel, and forming the most conspicuous
object in the little area, is the 'condemned pew': A huge black pen in
which the wretched people, who are singled out for death, are placed on
the last Sunday preceding their execution, in sight of all their fellow
prisoners, from many of whom they may have been separated but a week
before, to hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of
their own burial service, and to listen to an address warning their
recent companions to take example by their own fate and urging
themselves, while there is yet time--nearly four-and-twenty hours--to
'turn and flee from the wrath to come.' At one time--and at no distant
period either--the coffins of the men about to be executed, were placed
in that pew, upon the seat by their side, during the whole service." The
chapel has been rearranged since the time in which Boz wrote, and the
ghastliest part of its show done away with.
In the condemned ward Boz found "five-and-twenty or thirty prisoners,
all under sentence of death, awaiting the result of the recorder's
report--men of all ages and appearances, from a hardened old offender
with swarthy face and grizzly beard of three days' growth, to a handsome
boy not fourteen years old, and of singularly youthful appearance even
for that age, who had been condemned for burglary." It must be
remembered that they hanged men for all sorts of offenses in England
then, which made the population of the condemned ward abundant around
sessions time, when the trials were on. The death penalty was as common
then as it is now rare in its infliction. "The room was large, airy and
clean. One or two decently dressed men were brooding with a dejected air
over the fire; several little groups of two or three had been engaged in
conversation at the upper end of the room, or in the windows; and the
remainder were crowded around a young man seated at a table, who
appeared to be engaged in teaching the younger ones to write. On the
table lay a Testament, but there were no tokens of its having been in
recent use. In the press-room below were the men, the nature of whose
offense rendered it necessary to separate them, even from their
companions in guilt. It is a long sombre room, with two windows sunk in
the stone wall, and here the wretched men are pinioned on the mornings
of their execution, before moving toward the scaffold."
"A few paces up the yard," he goes on, "and forming a continuation of
the building, lie the condemned cells. The entrance is by a narrow and
obscure staircase, leading to a dark passage, in which a charcoal stove
casts a lurid light over the objects in its immediate vicinity, and
diffuses something like a warmth around. Prior to the recorder's report
being made, all the prisoners under the sentence of death are removed
from the day room at five o'clock in the afternoon, and locked up in
these cells, where they are allowed a candle until ten o'clock; and here
they remain until seven the next morning. When the warrant for the
prisoner's execution arrives, he is removed to the cells, and confined
in one of them until he leaves it for the scaffold. He is at liberty to
walk in the yard; but both in the walks and in his cell, he is
constantly attended by a turnkey, who never leaves him on any pretence."
The cell was "a stone dungeon eight feet long by six feet wide, with a
bench at the upper end, under which were a common rug, a Bible and a
prayer-book. An iron candle-stick was fixed into the wall at the side;
and a small high window at the back admitted as much air and light as
could struggle in between a double row of heavy, crossed iron bars." It
was in one of these dens ("Oliver Twist," Chapter 52) that Fagin spent
his last hours.
"They led him through a paved room under the court, where some
prisoners were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking
to their friends, who crowded around a gate which looked into the open
yard. There was nobody there to speak to him; but, as he passed, the
prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were
clinging to the bars; and they assailed him with opprobrious names,
and screeched and hissed. He shook his fist, and would have spat upon
them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage
lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison.
"Here he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of
anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of
the condemned cells, and left him there--alone.
"He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for a
seat and bedstead; and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground,
tried to collect his thoughts. After a while, he began to remember a
few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said; though it seemed
to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These gradually
fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more; so that
in a little time he had the whole almost as it was delivered. To be
hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end. To be hanged
by the neck till he was dead.
"As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had
known who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means.
They rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count
them. He had seen some of them die--and had joked, too, because they
died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop
went down; and how suddenly they changed from strong and vigorous men
to dangling heaps of clothes.
"Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very
spot. It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light? The cell had
been built for many years. Scores of men must have passed their last
hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead
bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew,
even beneath that hideous veil. Light--Light.
"At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy
door and walls, two men appeared: one bearing a candle, which he
thrust into an iron candle-stick fixed against the wall; the other
dragging a mattress on which to pass the night; for the prisoner was
to be left alone no more.
"Then came night--dark, dismal, silent night. Other watchers are glad
to hear the clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To
the Jew they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden
with one deep, hollow sound--Death. What availed the noise and bustle
of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him? It was
another form of knell, with mockery added to its warning.
"The day passed off--day. There was no day; it was gone as soon as
come--and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short, long
in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. At one time
he raved and blasphemed; and at another howled and tore his hair.
Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but
he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable
efforts, and he beat them off.
"Saturday night. He had only one more night to live, and as he thought
of this, the day broke--Sunday.
"It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering
sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon
his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive
hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than
dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of
the two men, who relieved each other in attendance upon him; and they,
for their parts, made no efforts to arouse his attention. He sat
there, awake, but dreaming. Now he started up, every minute, and with
gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm
of fear and wrath that even they--used to such sights--recoiled from
him with horror. He grew so terrible, at last, in all the tortures of
his evil conscience that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing
him alone; and so the two kept watch together.
"He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had
been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his
capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair
hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into
knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh
crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--ten. If it was
not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on
each other's heels, where would he be, when they came around again?
Eleven! Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had
ceased to vibrate. At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own
funeral train; at eleven----
"Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which had hidden so much misery and
unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often and too
long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dreaded a spectre as
that. The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man
was doing, who was to be hung to-morrow, would have slept but ill that
night if they could have but seen him.
"From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two
and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with
anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received. These being
answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to the
clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from
which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built,
and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the
scene. By degrees they fell off, one by one; and for an hour in the
dead of the night, the street was left to solitude and darkness."
When Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared at the wicket, and presented an
order of admission to the prisoner, signed by one of the Sheriffs, they
were immediately admitted to the lodge.
"The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from
side to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than
the face of a man. His mind was evidently wandering to his old life,
for he continued to mutter, without appearing conscious of their
presence otherwise than as a part of his vision.
"'Fagin,' said the gaoler.
"'That's me,' cried the Jew, falling, instantly into the attitude of
listening he assumed upon his trial. 'An old man, my Lord; a very old
man.'
"'Here,' said the turnkey, laying his hand upon his breast to keep him
down. 'Here's somebody wants to see you, to ask you some questions, I
suppose. Fagin, Fagin, are you a man?'
"'I shan't be one long,' replied the Jew, looking up with a face
retaining no human expression but rage and terror. 'Strike them all
dead! What right have they to butcher me?'"
Since hanging by wholesale went out in England, Newgate has had no use
for condemned wards, nor for its great number of condemned cells. The
former are now broken up into cells, or used as exercise rooms or
offices. Most of the latter are now punishment cells, in which
refractory prisoners are confined. The demoralizing system of
confinement in gangs has been done away with also, the cells in which
the prisoners froze in cold weather have been made comfortable, and the
standard of the management of the jail raised in every way. Such
prisoners as may be condemned to death--there are only a few a year now,
where in Dickens's boyhood there were several every week--are kept apart
from their fellows and from each other. They are confined in an ordinary
cell until they are convicted. Then they are transferred to a strong
cell in the old condemned cell ward, and thence they travel to the
scaffold.
Between the Old Bailey Court House and the condemned ward of Newgate is
a yard called the Press Yard. The name has a hideous origin. This spot
was for many years the scene of one of the most terrible tortures ever
inflicted by the cruelty of man upon his kind, the awful torture of
"Pressing to Death." This torture was imposed on prisoners held for
higher crimes, like treason and felonies, who refused to answer in
court. Nowadays, this would be construed into contempt of court. Until a
century ago it was held an offense so hideous as to warrant death by
torture. Nowadays we do not ask a prisoner to criminate himself. Then,
if he did not, he was tortured; if he did he was punished anyway. The
prisoner condemned to be pressed was stripped naked, except, for
decency's sake, a cloth around the loins, and laid on his back on the
pavement. Then iron weights were piled upon a board placed on his body,
in increasing number, and on a diet of three morsels of bread a day and
three draughts of water, he was left to perish miserably. He never
needed a full day's rations. Sometimes he lasted for hours, and at
others, as in the case of Mayor Strangeways, who was pressed for the
murder of John Fussel in 1659, he died in a few moments. This poor
wretch was stoned by the mob in the prison yard while undergoing the
torture. Highwaymen, house-breakers, forgers, utterers of forged and
counterfeit money, as well as murderers and traitors, were pressed to
death. Brutal and callous as the era was, the shocking practice excited
such denunciation in time that the victims were finally subjected to the
torture privately in the room known as the Press Room whose door opens
into the Press Yard. But the practice of pressing was kept up until as
late as 1770.
The Press Yard to this day is devoted to quite as gloomy and deadly, if
less revolting, service under sanction of the law. It is here that the
executions of Newgate are performed. The gallows is set up close to the
door out of which the prisoner is brought. There is no march to the
gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The
doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down
which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from
my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on
within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge,
and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the
gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. There was an old
burying ground in the prison, now disused, which was opened in 1820.
Thistlewood and the other Cato Street Conspirators were the first
criminals buried in it. They were buried in the night on the day of
their execution, without services, and many others like them in after
years. A pit and a shroud of quicklime were the appropriate Newgate
epitaph.
The ingenious fancy of Mr. Ainsworth has made Jack Sheppard's escape
from Newgate one of the chief episodes of his famous book. The simple
facts of his hero's evasion from the gaol are much less romantic,
considering the number of prisoners it held. The escapes from Newgate
were very few, and in almost every instance they owed a great measure of
their success to the connivance of officials within the walls. Until the
tidal wave of prison reform swept it clean of its old, corrupt
practices, Newgate was managed largely for the benefit and profit of its
guardians, from the keeper down. Each official was an adept at the art
of extortion, and every palm that held a key was troubled with the itch.
The prisoner could purchase most things he might desire, and even the
chance of liberty was not beyond price. It was only the chance to be
sure; his keeper would wink at the effort, but he must take the risk of
being stopped upon his way by others, unless he could fairly buy his
passage from his dungeon to the lodge gate. A few--a very few--did this,
and got away. Generally the escapes were mere attempts, frustrated
before the last barrier was passed. The most remarkable escape made from
the prison, because it was accomplished without aid within or without
the walls, was that of the Sweep. This ruffian, from practice in his
trade of climbing chimneys, actually contrived to scale the rough stone
wall in an angle of one of the jail yards, by working himself up with
his back and feet, until he reached the leads, over which he made his
way to the roof of a house in Newgate street, which he entered through
the scuttle, and so went down stairs and into the street. Since that
time the inner walls of Newgate have been smoothed, so that even a fly
could not crawl up them, and spiked at the top to make assurance doubly
sure.